Ryan McCuaig

2026 Jun 23 #

• Every layer of review makes you 10x slower - "The job of a code reviewer isn't to review code. It's to figure out how to obsolete their code review comment, that whole class of comment, in all future cases, until you don't need their reviews at all anymore. (Think of the people who first created `go fmt` and how many stupid code review comments about whitespace are gone forever. Now that's engineering.)"

2026 Jun 12 #

• Convert an Excel Workbook to Clojure Code - This essay sure nails the diagnosis on why there so much Excel in the world.

2026 Jun 05 #

• Magnifica Technologia: Seven key takeaways from Canada's new AI strategy - "Artificial intelligence is never defined in the strategy—an omission so fundamental that it is hard to imagine it was an accident. That ambiguity is the source of serious conceptual drift. [...] The strategy claims that its “north star” is building trust in AI. However, as the document makes abundantly clear, the true guiding principle of the strategy is AI adoption. Everything else, including trust, is a means to that end. These are not the only issues that the new federal AI strategy ignores (there is also warfare, corporate power, human rights, ethics and more) but they are emblematic of the underlying ethos of the Magnifica Technologia. The federal government seems to truly believe that “prosperity and sovereignty in this era belong to nations that can leverage trust to adopt, build, and govern AI.” In the context of that vision, there is no space for fundamental concerns about AI itself. Nevertheless, Canada has its long-overdue artificial intelligence strategy. Now comes the hard part. The federal government must deliver on its commitments to safety regulation and it must be prepared to pick a side when those commitments come into conflict with the demands of the AI industry. It must also be prepared to respond to the evidence, even (and especially) when it conflicts with the government’s vision of AI adoption. Faith can only take us so far."

2026 Jun 04 #

• The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription - "The technology, when honed, is genuinely amazing. Ask it to zero shot a parser for an esoteric grammar implemented in an esoteric language with full tests and it's done. The tooling as it exists today promotes absolutely nothing like the focus required to apply it judiciously. Almost every vendor and every tool intends to do exactly the opposite: more usage, more tokens, more output. Ask a simple yes/no question of ChatGPT and you can clearly see that it is hard-wired to include a relevant follow-up question to promote excessive interaction. Slopping out a 10,000 LOC untested Python/JS mess in 5 minutes helps nobody. The thought of this happening in every commercial environment simultaneously is horrifying."
• No, Artificial Intelligence Is Not Conscious - "It’s not plausible to me that a development path where the first step is a sentence-continuation machine that emits bad Julius Caesar dialogue and the next step is a sentence-continuation machine that emits decent Julius Caesar dialogue is one with a conscious Julius Caesar—or consciousness of any sort—as its end point. Faking the moon landing is a good step toward faking a Mars colony, but it’s not a good step toward actually putting astronauts on Mars."

2026 Jun 01 #

• How to be inspired without copying - "You have to be patient with the gap. Years of input precede any output worth keeping. Bach copied Vivaldi for years before the Brandenburgs. Picasso painted in classical mode for two decades before cubism. Joni Mitchell played other people's standards in coffee houses for years before Blue. Hunter Thompson typed out The Great Gatsby and then spent fifteen years writing journalism that no one could ever mistake for Fitzgerald. These are long, long stretches of work that looked, from outside, like nothing was happening. Inside, the inputs were being broken down into their components, sorted, and rebuilt as something the practitioner could call their own. The temptation, especially now, is to skip this phase by trusting a model to deliver the surface without the years. That temptation should be refused for the same reason a virtuoso refuses to lip-sync: the work that bypasses the apprenticeship produces no apprentice, only an output. And an output is not enough."
• Good Design is About Process, not Product - <blockquote> <ul> <li>Focus on your process, not the end product.</li> <li>Keep your creative and execution modes of working formally separated.</li> <li>Delay decisions until the moment they must be made.</li> <li>A short time interval between revisions is more important than whether you will complete a project by its deadline.</li> <li>Redesign is the essence of design.</li> <li>Be opinionated in your principles, but liberal in their implementation.</li> </ul> </blockquote>

2026 May 31 #

• Debris of Separation - “Showy and detached and hyperformally expressive buildings cannot be merely coincidental with showy and detached men who believe they have a lot to say. Buildings that seek attachment, encounter, mediation, collaboration, and integration into existing built fabrics and communities may encourage—may even require—different behaviors from their designers.”

2026 May 30 #

• Affordances for me, but not for thee - “More importantly, whereas accessibility affordances provide new abilities for vulnerable people, an AI affordance provides new abilities for people with power. And that’s probably the heart of it.”

2026 May 29 #

• The fall of the theorem economy: How AI could destroy mathematics and barely touch it - “The product of mathematics is clarity and understanding. Not theorems, by themselves. Is there, for example any real reason that even such famous results as Fermat’s Last Theorem, or the Poincaré conjecture, really matter? Their real importance is not in their specific statements, but their role in challenging our understanding, presenting challenges that led to mathematical developments that increased our understanding… Mathematics only exists in a living community of mathematicians that spreads understanding and breathes life into ideas both old and new. The real satisfaction from mathematics is in learning from others and sharing with others. All of us have clear understanding of a few things and murky concepts of many more. There is no way to run out of ideas in need of clarification…”

2026 May 28 #

• Appearing Productive in The Workplace - "Generative AI can produce work that looks expert without being expert, and the failure arrives in two shapes. The first is when novices in a field are able to produce work that resembles what their seniors produce, faster or more advanced than their judgment. The second is when people generate artifacts in disciplines they were never trained in. The two failures look similar from a distance and are not the same. Research has mostly measured the first. The second is what it is missing, and in my experience it is the riskier of the two."

2026 May 27 #

• pg_mentat: Datomic-compatible Datalog inside PostgreSQL - Having a Datomic-alike sitting alongside PostGIS is a pretty compelling idea. I've wanted an EDN equivalent for JSONB for a while; just didn't expect it would drag a bunch of Datomic along for the ride.

2026 May 22 #

• My Journey to FreeBSD: Building a 'Just Focus' Laptop
• Steve's Jujutsu Tutorial
• Agent Skills

2026 May 20 #

• Ascetic Computing
• How I Use Git Worktrees
• We Need To Rewild The Internet
• Reflections on a decade of coding
• The Slow Death of the Power User
• Local PR review
• Who Will Remember Us When The Servers Go Dark?

2026 May 15 #

• Points are a weird and inconsistent unit of measure - Donald Knuth's particular flavour of pernickiness is a delight.

2026 May 14 #

• the machine that's designed to fool you - “One thing I have found myself thinking again and again while writing my current book is ‘am I about to touch an object which has been optimised to distract me?’ and asking that question seems to have greatly sped up my productivity.”
• Links to CSS colour palettes

2026 May 08 #

• Paul Cantrell (@inthehands@hachyderm.io) - "Good UX requires a shit umbrella."

2026 May 07 #

• You Should Never Be The Most Sycophantic Participant In A Conversation With A Chatbot - "Imagine a film director telling an actor to play a scene with greater emotive intensity, and then afterward being like 'Jeez, I'm so sorry to have upset you.' Imagine a costume designer dressing a performer up like Albert Einstein and thinking that would make them capable of explaining general relativity. Imagine a gamer turning up the difficulty setting on FIFA and thinking they'd made their Playstation better at soccer. Andreessen is creating—typing out and entering, but not into the chatbot—his own delusion. In trying to tell the chatbot not to hallucinate, he is scripting his own psychotic break. He is doing it because he is a huge dumbass. Don't expect Claude to tell him so."
• Life During Class Wartime - "War is bad. Don’t start one. But we’re already in a class war and we’re losing. Where by 'we' I mean most people; the winning side comprises, roughly, the richest 0.1% of the population, who are morphing into a hereditary aristocracy."
• This Canadian millionaire wants to pay higher taxes

2026 May 05 #

• What Sort of AI Bubble Are We In? - “One of the major reasons why existing data centers cannot keep up with the computational demand is that the AI industry is not the least bit interested in pursuing efficiencies that would make their products less computationally demanding. They’ve constructed a sort of financial flywheel, where they subsidize computation-heavy behavior from users, then report back to investors about the soaring product demand and use it to justify the next investment round. If they built more efficient AI models, then it would paradoxically become harder to attract the next trillion dollars of investor cash.”

2026 Apr 30 #

• The Social Edge of Intelligence - ‘AI doesn’t really “think.” Rather, it remembers how we thought together. And we’re about to stop giving it anything worth remembering.’

2026 Apr 23 #

• textarea.my - A 160-line text editor that has a nifty trick on using CompressionStream to keep state in the URL.
• The Future of Everything is Lies, I Guess

2026 Apr 21 #

• AI has limits, even if many AI people can't see them - “He describes some famous results from the research of psychologist Paul Meehl on medical and other decisions, which suggested that 'statistical prediction provided more accurate judgments about the future than clinical judgments' under certain conditions. But the conclusion that Ben comes to is not that this means that statistical prediction is generally better than expert judgment. Instead, it is better when there are clearly defined outcomes, good data, and clear reference cases that can be used for comparison. There are many situations in which this is not true, and cannot readily be made true.”
• everything is a nail, or at least it ought to be - “As he puts it (following Paul Meehl), algorithmic decision making is always going to have the evidence on its side. Because once you have put the problem in terms of the kinds of things which can be measured and defined a specific success metric - once there is any standard of evidence with which to judge the results - then 'optimisation' means what it says. Anything you do differently from the output of an optimiser is … suboptimal. But this often means that all the work is done in deciding what to measure and what the optimand should be, what counts as evidence and what as a test. Not only is that process a great way to put your thumb on the scale without leaving fingerprints, a lot of the time things get measured because they are convenient to measure, rather than any particularly principled reason. As I’ve constantly said in econometric context, the easiest way to find a valid instrument for an unobservable quantity is simply to lower your standards.”
• LLMe - An interesting observation here is that LLM code ingestion doesn’t appear to distinguish good from bad examples, and tends towards examples that work at all, but both good and bad have a lot to teach if we keep clear which one we’re looking at.

2026 Apr 16 #

• The peril of laziness lost - “The problem is that LLMs inherently lack the virtue of laziness. Work costs nothing to an LLM. LLMs do not feel a need to optimize for their own (or anyone’s) future time, and will happily dump more and more onto a layercake of garbage. Left unchecked, LLMs will make systems larger, not better — appealing to perverse vanity metrics, perhaps, but at the cost of everything that matters. As such, LLMs highlight how essential our human laziness is: our finite time forces us to develop crisp abstractions in part because we don’t want to waste our (human!) time on the consequences of clunky ones. The best engineering is always borne of constraints, and the constraint of our time places limits on the cognitive load of the system that we’re willing to accept. This is what drives us to make the system simpler, despite its essential complexity.”
• Zen fascists will control you... - "Jello Biafra was writing a joke about a California politician. He was also writing a warning about a kind of person. That kind of person, today, is doing very well for themselves indeed."

2026 Apr 09 #

• printed analog camera space
• Is a random human peer better than a highly supportive chatbot in reducing loneliness over time? - The rare headline phrased in Inverse [Bettridge's Law of Headlines](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines).

2026 Apr 08 #

• Datomic: Look at all the things I'm not doing!
• Datomic: Look at all the things I'm not doing! (Cont.)
• Datomic: Event Sourcing without the hassle

2026 Apr 04 #

• The machines are fine. I'm worried about us. - "He said that 'LLMs will take away what's so great about science.' At the time, I thought he was just talking about his own competitive edge, his fluency as a native English speaker, his ability to write fast and publish often. And he was. But I've come to think the phrase itself was more right than he knew, even if his reasons for saying it were mostly self-interested. What's great about science is its people. The slow, stubborn, sometimes painful process by which a confused student becomes an independent thinker. If we use these tools to bypass that process in favor of faster output, we don't just risk taking away what's great about science. We take away the only part of it that wasn't replaceable in the first place."

2026 Apr 03 #

• The "Passive Income" trap ate a generation of entrepreneurs

2026 Mar 26 #

• Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

2026 Mar 25 #

• The hardest working font in Manhattan

2026 Mar 24 #

• GeoPalettes — Color Palettes for Geosciences

2026 Mar 23 #

• Slop-Machine Future
• Sucker: My year as a degenerate gambler
• "Gooning Towards The Führer" as policy coordination - “The pathologies of Seeing Like a State - of failing to observe or understand problems that cannot be broken down into simple metrics and regularized categories are very well documented. The state can’t easily coordinate its activities to deal with problems that cannot be expressed in terms that it understands. The pathologies of Seeing Like an Idiot are worse understood, because we haven’t had to think so hard about them. They don’t just involve ineptitude and blunders, but a nearly complete incapacity to see or talk about the much wider set of problems that can’t be expressed via goonability. By and large, the abstractions of goonability carry sparser and less useful information than the abstractions of bureaucracy.”

2026 Mar 07 #

• Stone Tools - "Exploring retro productivity software from the 8/16-bit era. No games, just work."

2026 Feb 08 #

• GitHub Actions Is Slowly Killing Your Engineering Team - “Cache keys are confusing, cache misses are silent, and cache eviction is opaque. You will spend more time debugging caching than you save by having a cache.”

2026 Feb 04 #

• LLMs at Oxide - This sort of you-need-to-hold-it-right advice reminds me of learning to hit Cmd-S every 30 seconds or so without conscious thought, as a key skill of using a 1990s Mac.

2026 Jan 13 #

• Misc engineering truisms - A little grab bag of hints from all over the place in web development.

2025 Dec 11 #

• What are formal systems? - I'm very charmed by the idea that just the right mix of meaning and meaninglessness can generate power in the world.

2025 Dec 10 #

• AI optimism is a class privilege

2025 Dec 01 #

• Is there a general skill of “management”? - "[T]he kernel of my argument for the existence of a general skill of management is that it is pretty obvious that there is a general deficit or 'negative skill' of _mismanagement_, which equally obviously appears to work in roughly the same way in a variety of fields, and that therefore an opening stab at a definition of the general skill of management would be that it’s the absence of this deficit."

2025 Nov 26 #

• Large Language Models and Emergence: A Complex Systems Perspective - “Minimally, emergence describes the reorganization of a system that can support a new, often smaller description, that screens off microscopic details not essential to predicting the future of a system. Emergence matters because it leads to an enormous cost saving in how systems are described, predicted, and controlled. We do not need to use quantum mechanics to build a bridge because the classical world emerges from the quantum—a fact exploited by engineers.”
• My Life Is a Lie - “Altruism is a function of surplus. It is easy to be charitable when you have excess capacity. It is impossible to be charitable when you are fighting for the last bruised banana.”
• The Trillion-Dollar Cost of IT’s Willful Ignorance - "It may be a forlorn request, but surely it is time the IT community stops repeatedly making the same ridiculous mistakes it has made since at least 1968, when the term “software crisis” was coined. Make new ones, damn it."

2025 Nov 18 #

• A Month of Chat-Oriented Programming - "[...] I got Claude to write well over 99% of the code produced during the month. I found the experience infuriating, unpleasant, and stressful before even worrying about its energy impact. Ideally, I would prefer not to do it again for at least a year or two. The only problem with that is that it “worked”. [...] Against my expectation going in, I have changed my mind. I now believe chat-oriented programming (“CHOP”) can work today, if your tolerance for pain is high enough."

2025 Nov 13 #

• Why 98.5% of organizations have slow actions/checkout - Going to sparse checkouts seems to have shaved a full minute off my 5 minute test suite run time.
• Your URL Is Your State
• Elements of Malli
• Rendering surfaces

2025 Oct 21 #

• On AI and the golem - “We are teetering on the edge of the collapse of this particular bubble, and there’s no doubt that ordinary people who didn’t waste precious resources generating sub-par horny images are going to pay the price. Unfortunately, there is very little I can do for us in that regard. What I can do is highlight the fact that the people of the past already answered the philosophical questions surrounding this particular bad idea for us. As we are constantly told that the arts and humanities have no value, and that we can have machines do that work for us, I think this is an important reminder. To be human is to do the work. For better or worse.”

2025 Oct 17 #

• Choosing friction - That feeling when you're pretty sure you've found one of your people.
• Right Turn of Death - What the what the right-turn-on-a-red-light is _younger than I am_ and was a largely-ineffective idea to save gas during the oil shocks of the 1970s.

2025 Oct 15 #

• Linear Algebra - Gilbert Strang's introductory course at MIT.

2025 Oct 09 #

• Who Goes Nazi? - From 1941: “It is an interesting and somewhat macabre parlor game to play at a large gathering of one’s acquaintances: to speculate who in a showdown would go Nazi.”
• Dewaffling the tech industry

2025 Oct 08 #

• A curated collection of answers that Rich gave throughout the history of Clojure - One of those resources to re-read every year or two.
• Simple TUIs with Babashka and Gum - Text-based interfaces at the shell make a nice alternative to having to either make a local webapp or wrestle with SwiftUI.
• Keeping Secrets Out of Logs - “So, there are some problems that are annoying. And there are some problems that are difficult. This is both. I’m gonna level with you: I absolutely hate this problem.”

2025 Jun 25 #

• Interesting Bits of Postgres Grammar

2025 Jun 08 #

• Teachers Are Not OK

2025 Jun 07 #

• What if... we were taught transducers first?
• Beyond the If Pattern

2025 May 15 #

• An AI’s Prediction Of The Future Of Art - “I asked an AI to predict the near future of art and creative work. This is the story it told me.”

2025 May 04 #

• How to Structure a Clojure Web App 101 - “What has been a challenge is explaining what exactly it is that these libraries do. Doing that - really doing that - requires a mountain of shared context that folks simply do not have.”

2025 Apr 04 #

• On the foolishness of 'natural language programming' - “It was a significant improvement that now many a silly mistake did result in an error message instead of in an erroneous answer. (And even this improvement wasn't universally appreciated: some people found error messages they couldn't ignore more annoying than wrong results, and, when judging the relative merits of programming languages, some still seem to equate "the ease of programming" with the ease of making undetected mistakes.)”

2025 Feb 21 #

• HUMAN_FALLBACK - A wonderfully-written memoir of time spent being behind the curtain of a Potemkin AI.
• Why Clojure? - An overview of what makes it a pleasure to work in.

2025 Feb 11 #

• Situated Software - Re-reading Clay Shirky articles I first read before the Facebook era just hurts. I hear a Ron Howard Arrested Development Narrator voice in the back of my head saying, "But unfortunately, Facebook."
• An app can be a home-cooked meal - If “learn to code” were meant the same way as “learn to cook.”

2025 Feb 06 #

• You Can’t Post Your Way Out of Fascism - “You can d­iscourse and quote-dunk and fact-check until you’re blue in the face, but at a certain point, you have to stop and decide what truth you believe in. The internet has conditioned us to constantly seek new information, as if becoming a sponge of bad news will eventually yield the final piece of a puzzle. But there is also such a thing as having _enough_ information.”

2025 Feb 02 #

• Multiple Shadow-CLJS builds at the same runtime - A neat little hack to run shadow-cljs against two builds.

2025 Jan 31 #

• CodeCharta - Codebases visualized as architectural models seems very much like my jam.
• A Rant about "Technology" - “Technology is the active human interface with the material world. But the word is consistently misused to mean only the enormously complex and specialised technologies of the past few decades, supported by massive exploitation both of natural and human resources. This is not an acceptable use of the word.”

2025 Jan 30 #

• Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog - Oddly timely advice.

2025 Jan 27 #

• Algebraic Effects(-ish Things) in Clojure - An exploration of what an algebraic effect system might look like in Clojure.
• Case Study ⸺ Tracing Command Chains through Time and Location - Using Datomic to map chains of command in the Myanmar military, because it’s well-suited to tracking shifting graphs over time. Surfacing a “claim” about someone commanding someone else as a reified thing in the data model lets them track the provenance of the derived graph in an interesting way.

2025 Jan 26 #

• JAR on 'Object-Oriented' - "Because OO is a moving target, OO zealots will choose some subset of this menu by whim and then use it to try to convince you that you are a loser."
• In defense of blub studies - "So I always feel a little bit embarrassed and boring when I instead suggest going really deep on what you already know: your main programming language, web framework, object-relational mapper, UI library, version control system, database, Unix tools, etc. It’s not shiny or esoteric, but for me, building a detailed mental model of those (and how they compare to alternatives) might be the learning that’s contributed most to my effectiveness as an engineer."

2024 Dec 28 #

• I keep turning my Google Sheets into phone-friendly webapps, and I can’t stop - I enjoy reading about this kind of thing, then get annoyed that this Filemaker-1998ish kind of itch-scratching is so janky and provisional and snuck into the free tier.

2024 Dec 27 #

• Ghostty - Ghostty came out yesterday, if you're into terminal emulators.
• filipesilva/datomic-pro-sqlite - Datomic is so abstract on the storage end that it took me a long time to figure out how to ... store stuff. Thus, I am really liking this docker image for quickly setting up a transactor that uses sqlite. (For low to medium write volumes this seems fine, since architecturally nothing is competing with the transactor for writes anyway.